a portrait of a hot dog restaurant the day after tyler, the creator dropped his newest album
including lyrics from Tyler, the Creator’s “Earfquake”
We all have the same grease fryer smell stored in our cheek pockets, our bodies turning inside out when Tyler screams don’t leave in two different pitches. A mangled potato membrane wraps around my crooked teeth, stained yellow from grief, crackling like bees dancing off sidewalks. The first day of summer doesn’t come until Jessi, Alex, & I hit up this hot dog joint the next town over. A month before the solstice burns like cigarette; the evening after IGOR dropped. There’s a sun-soaked eighty-degree dusk burning beneath mint-colored heaven. & we feel like gods, ‘cause we’re getting high on that red pop they don’t sell anywhere else. My father, two scraped knees once bent over the edges of these booth seats, in a decade where they played smear the queer in the empty lot next door, can sense that the mechanical hot dog rotating on the roof is getting slower every year. & the parking lot still gets emptier & emptier, pot holes turning into sinkholes turning into caskets. No one here cares where my mouth’s been, how I’m Coke bottle curved, but they still don’t love me like I’ve always prayed they would. So, I sit here & slowly vanish like stale fireworks, after making a mess on the tiny hairs above my lips, still feeling like the cursive Playboy Carti raps in a minute-forty into the track, because I’ve got dysmorphia masked as a circus of welts on my stomach from T injections, emaciation posing as a tuxedo cummerbund tight around my ribs. Sometimes I wonder if Tyler sampled me grieving at the funeral of my old body, golden child hiding under gossamered anthills, stinking of darkness & turtleneck covering pale, trespassed hickies, when he sings when it all comes crashing down, I need you.
Matt Mitchell is an intersex poet from Ohio trying to make his work as beautiful as “Hold Me Now” by the Thompson Twins, the quintessential pop banger. He’s a former Best Hair winner in high school, and the self-elected Poet Laureate of Vanilla Coke drinkers. His chapbook, you & me & the pink moon & these portraits, was released by Ghost City Press in August 2019.